Notes from Ghost Town (17 page)

Even when he pulls away, the impression of him lingers on my skin. His face is twisted, and he grips the sides of the bench again like he’s got a terrible stomachache.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” I move closer to him, but he edges away, putting one hand up to stop me.

“It was … it was painful to be so close to you.”

“I’m sorry,” I say quietly.

“But it’s painful either way, Liver. You know that, don’t you?” He sits at the other end of the bench and we stare at each other. He bites his own bottom lip, moves a tuft of thick hair behind his ear. I press a foot on and off the pedals at the bottom of Mom’s piano.

We sit in silence for a while—but somehow, it’s a comfortable silence.

“So,” I finally ask, “Did it help? Do you remember anything else?”

He sighs. “I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he admits. “It felt really good, though.” He looks at me for a second and then looks back at his hands.

We sit on my mother’s cold piano bench for what feels like an hour, not speaking, not needing to speak. Just feeling the vibration of each other’s bodies—my warmth and his ice—letting the frigid room hold us in for a little while longer like two small lost children. Which we are.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say, finally, standing up and shutting the lid to the piano, left open for all these months without Mom to monitor its proper upkeep. As soon as I do, though, a rush of papers hidden, stuffed, behind the
lid come spilling out onto the floor. I stoop to collect them back up, tenderly. They must have been things Mom was working on just before shit hit the fan. She wasn’t necessarily the most neat or organized of people, but this was part of her charm. At least, I always thought so.

“What’s all that?” Stern asks, peering over my shoulder.

“Compositions, I guess,” I mutter distractedly, blowing the dust from each new sheet. “Some recommendation letters … one addressed to the Juilliard admissions board,” I say, skimming the paper in my hands. “It’s about you, Stern.” I move back beside him on the bench and continue skimming, reporting back the interesting bits. “Mom wrote this right before the competition, right before … everything. About someone named Marietta Jones who—who did something to you?” I read further. “Misconduct,” I quote, slowly, from Mom’s scribble. My eyes meet Stern’s in the flickering darkness. He sucks with some intensity on his bottom lip, struggling to reclaim everything death has erased from his brain.

“What else does it say? Just read it to me.”

“Okay—it’s sort of hard to make out some parts ’cause it’s messy and kind of scratched-up, but,” I continue, squinting at the page, “I’ll do my best.” I clear my throat dramatically and begin to read: “To whom it may concern … I must inform you of an incident of misconduct involving two current scholarship competitors—Marietta Jones, and a student of mine, Lucas Stern. Learning that Lucas was to play the same piece that she had planned
to play, Marietta directly confronted my student in the parking lot after a pre-recital practice on July 15, and told him that she would ‘do anything she could to make sure he didn’t play.’ It is my belief that her threat was a serious one, indicating an intent to inflict physical harm. In light of this information, I feel that Marietta Jones must be eliminated from the competition, based on rule 12A listed in the competition handbook indicating an absolute zero tolerance policy for threats of, or actuated violence between competitors. Please feel free to contact me with any further questions. Miriam Tithe.”

Stern and I meet eyes again, both of us momentarily stunned. My hands start trembling so hard I think I might rip this magical piece of paper in two. “Marietta Jones?”

Stern shrugs, still struggling, always struggling, now. “Marietta Jones …” he repeats, uncertainly. “Marietta Jones. Marietta Jones. Marietta Jones.”

And then, suddenly, it clicks.
“Tuna Face!”
I cry.

“Tuna Face?” He gives me a funny look.

“The girl who was stirring up all sorts of shit before the competition! I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before! You told me about her, like, a bunch of times. I just—I didn’t know her real name. Because you always
only
ever referred to her as Tuna Face.”

He laughs briefly, looks down at his hands. “Tuna Face. That’s pretty funny. What did she do to me?”

“She actually expected you to change your piece last minute because she was a senior or some crap. And you
wouldn’t, and that’s when she threatened you, and why Mom must have written that letter. Man … I’d forgotten all about that girl.”

He looks back up at me, his eyes suddenly mournful. “Juilliard—I wanted it, pretty badly, didn’t I?”

“Since you were five. It was, like, all you’d talk about.”

“Wow.” He wraps his arms around himself, shivering. “That must have been pretty annoying…. Maybe that’s why Marietta did it. She just wanted to shut me up.”

“Maybe. That, and she was totally nuts. The really crazy thing is—you weren’t even really
in
the running for the scholarship that year, because you were just a junior.”

“Then why did I—”

“You told me you just wanted to play the best thing so they’d notice you, for next year, when you applied. Because you
would
have gone there,” I add, fervently. “That’s why she was afraid. Because everyone knew that you were brilliant and that even though you were a junior, you would have beat all of them, because you deserved it. I mean, you practiced like a freaking maniac. I was there. Every day, right upstairs, listening.” My voice breaks at the end and I feel stomach-sick as I look at him there on the bench, all balled into himself. I want, desperately, for him to remember or, at least, to stop forgetting. “If the letter’s still here, though,” he asks, “does that mean that your Mom never sent it?”

“I don’t know. This is obviously just a draft, and since she wrote it right before shit went down, she might not
have gotten the chance to type it up, or send it at all….” My breath catches in my throat and my chest suddenly feels all lit up. “Or, maybe she meant to, but then Marietta found out … and she couldn’t.”

I sit back on the bench and hug myself. My fingers are thick with cold. “Marietta must have found out somehow that Mom was planning to do this—I mean, knowing Mom, she would have called Marietta, or at least her parents or something first and tried to straighten things out. It would make sense … for Marietta to make sure Mom was blamed. She was posing a direct threat to her whole career, or at least that’s how Marietta must have seen it.”

“So wait … you think this girl really might have killed me and framed your mom just so she would win some competition that I couldn’t have even
won
that year?” He shakes his head, a single inky curl coming loose on his forehead. “That’s—that’s insane.”

“Yeah—the competition
and
her reputation. And Stern—some of these kids
are
insane. You told me all sorts of crazy shit about what people’d do when they were stressed out and overly ambitious. Art kids are the same way—some of them at least. When there’re awards involved.
Prestige
and all that. The competitions make them crazy. She obviously hated you, and
threatened
you,” I remind him, waving the letter in the air. “You wouldn’t have told my mom about it if it wasn’t something serious, right? It would never have come to this.”

“Yeah, Liv … I guess not.” His voice is husky and soft. A
voice I could listen to anywhere and feel instantly at home. “So … what do we do?” he asks—and when he looks up at me just then, I see him for a moment as he was when we were five years old, and everything was easy, and we had so much time.

Thick-throated, I fold the paper carefully in my hand. “We find her,” I say, jaw clenched, head throbbing, heart thump-thump-thumping. “Today. Now.”

And then, staring at my best friend’s face—the flickering image of him inside of this ancient-smelling room, full of Mom’s old life, all of our old lives—I stop time for a moment. I twist it backward, way backward. I twist it so far back that his heart’s beating again, and his skin is warm, and no one has found any reason to bash his head in and toss him into the water to die.

Because who could think anything—anything at all—was more important than life?

And it’s this thought that makes me turn to him, unthinkingly, and lean forward and push through the strange slow-motion field of time and life and death, and start to bring my face toward his.

“Liv. No,” he cries out, like he’s trying to stop me, like he’s in great pain. I pull back and our eyes meet for an
inch
of a second, and before I can even murmur
Stern
or
oh god I’ve loved you all this time you dead dum-dum:
poof. There he goes. Like he was never there in the first place.

And I guess it was my fault.

But for one second, time rewound itself, and he came back to me. I had him.

I lean against the still-open piano, pulsing fresh with anger, and the same gut-punch ache I feel every time I lose him—and pulsing, too, with some terrible little flame of joy, burning somewhere deep inside of me.

I
kiss Mom’s piano goodbye, finish closing it up with the gentleness of someone laying a baby down to sleep, and hurry through the flicker-lit halls of E-Z-Store and out to my car.

I’m still processing: Stern’s legs wrapped around me, his arms, his fingers over mine—feeling all the bewildering intensity of him in those moments we played, our fingers sliding together over Mom’s keys like it was some intimate party trick we’d been practicing for years.

Storm clouds gather in the distance. I signal my left turn out of the parking lot, try to turn the wheel to the left when I realize: I can’t. Something’s very wrong—my whole car, too, feels lower to the ground—like it’s scraping against the road. I pull, best I can, to the curb at the end of the street, shift my sad clunker-junker into park, and step outside as the first fat drops of rain start to fall.

My tire—no,
all
of my tires—are flat. I stoop closer, searching for punctures, bits of lodged glass, nails. I
notice there’s a flat, inch-long slit through the side of the driver’s side front wheel.

Curious, I step around and examine the three remaining tires: all of them have the same inch-long slit. No glass. No small, sharp-toothed animals. The same exact slit. I step back, feeling suddenly dizzy, realizing: someone did this on purpose.

There’s a thick knot in my throat. I climb back into my ruined ride, feeling suddenly exposed. Who would do something like that? And why?

A prank—a stupid prank. Probably nothing more than that.

Raina would know what to do right now. Raina always has the answers, and even when she doesn’t, she knows how to make me feel better.

Her Rihanna ringback tone cycles three times before she picks up. “Liv! Where the eff have you been all my life, girl?”

“Rain.” My voice catches in my throat as I say her name. I miss her. I miss feeling normal. I try not to cry but obviously she can tell something’s off.

“Liv—what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“Can you come get me, Rain?” I gasp. The rain pounds the roof.

“What? What happened? Where are you?”

“Liberty City.”

“Pork and Beans? Geez—what are you doing there alone? Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“I played hooky again,” I tell her, pausing. “I had to follow a lead.”

“A
lead
?”

“Just come get me. I’m calling a tow-truck as soon as I get off the phone with you. It’s the E-Z-Store on northwest 62nd.”

I sketch while I wait for her to come. I sketch the rain-stooped trees; sketch the boxy clots of housing projects on the other side of the highway. I sketch the power lines that swoop between lampposts and soggy laundry, drooping on clotheslines. It speeds time forward, so I hardly notice how long I sit alone in my car, waiting to be collected.

Raina folds me into her arms as soon as I get inside her mom’s Toyota station wagon. Her soft T-shirt smells of cigarettes. Something about that dull, nicotine scent mingled with her own particular Raina smell—sage and peach and sandalwood—makes the re-formed knot in my throat threaten to crack open again. “I missed you,” I say.

“Missed you too, little lady.” She sighs as we pull onto the highway. “The tow truck’s going to pull your poor baby somewhere nice?”

“Yeah. Autobody shop near home.” I shuffle through her iPod, avoiding her eyes.

She peers at me sideways as she drives. “You’re too skinny—I can see your ribs poking out.”

“I’m fine. Just haven’t been too hungry recently.”

“Are you going anorexic on me? Because I swear to god—”

“No, I’m not going
anorexic
on you,” I interrupt. “I—I’ve just had a lot on my mind, I guess. It’s just—it’s really hard to explain.”

“Well, why don’t you
try
, Liv? I’m your best friend. If you don’t tell me what’s going on with you, how am I supposed to help?”

“You
can’t
help, Raina.” I turn and stare out the window. This is why I’ve been avoiding her; I knew this would happen.

“How do you know? You’re not the only person in the world who’s ever dealt with anything bad, okay?” She’s driving ramrod straight, both hands on the wheel—very un-Rain. She’s angry, I realize. “You’re shutting me out.”

“Okay, fine!” I burst out. “My mom’s sentencing is next week and my dad won’t talk about it and nobody can tell me how to help her.” I’m starting to break inside, to flood. “She’s not supposed to
be
in a place like that. She’s dying in there, Raina. She’s going to die if I don’t fix this. And—” I bite my tongue and watch the highway disappear behind us, a long black tongue.

“And …?” she pries.

“Stern.”
Okay. Roll it out slow, Olivia. Roll it out slow
.

“Stern?”

I take a deep breath, keep fiddling with the iPod, and the window, and the stain on Raina’s car seat. Another deep breath.
Tell her
, my brain urges my lips.
You have to tell her.
“This sounds insane, Raina, okay, I know that, but … I’ve seen him.”